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As you'll soon notice, I'm very new to Linux. To be honest, this is the first distro I've installed so far so my jargon might be a little windowsish. After a few days of usage, I ran into a couple of problems and you'd help me on either one of them (preferably all:P). Here goes (in chronological order of occurrence):

1.) While watching .flv videos in Firefox, e.g. YouTube, the audio output seemed to be around 30%.
2.) After I tried adding Skype to "start-up tasks", via Sessions, two things occurred: a.) I could no longer start Sessions. It just loaded the tag on the taskbar called "Starting Sessions" which disappeared after some time, without anything else happening. b) The Main Manu itself got buggy. All the buttons, save for "Shut Down" worked fine, but it simply refused to disappear after I performed tasks with it. No matter how often I pressed on the "start button" it kept staying there. Only the "show desktop"-button worked.
3.) After I got frustrated playing with the Main Manu-bar, I stupidly enough clicked on "Remove from Panel" and whoosh, never found a way to get it back. My problem now is that I can't do anything at all. I don't know how to access the programs (i.e. where they are stored, how to execute them under Linux, etc), which makes all this rather annoying.

Nickpick wrote:3.) After I got frustrated playing with the Main Manu-bar, I stupidly enough clicked on "Remove from Panel" and whoosh, never found a way to get it back. My problem now is that I can't do anything at all. I don't know how to access the programs (i.e. where they are stored, how to execute them under Linux, etc), which makes all this rather annoying.

Any help would be great, so thanks in advance!

~~ Nick

Let me help with this one. If I understand you correctly, right click on the lower pane, click add, then browse for the icon you want reinstalled. Hope this helps.

Nickpick wrote:Oi! Thanks a bunch! I can't believe I overlooked the add button . That solves number three. It still refuses to disappear though. =/

BTW, welcome to Linux in general, and Linux Mint in particular.

Your lucky. You landed in one of the best, if not the best (my opinion), there is. Not only that, but you've managed to find Linux as it's emerging from its childhood.

If your willing to hang around, learn, and let go of some Windows practices and habits (as familiar as they are to you), I think you'll find Linux to be a superior OS that is rapidly growing in popularity.

Hehe, once again thanks. I've actually tried a couple of disros from the LiveCDs (Ubuntu, Gentoo, PCLinuxOS), but this one looked the sleekest and I've heard good things about it. I'm still running XP as a dual-boot for the sake of gaming, but that's about the only thing that bind me to it. The rest of the programs I use seem to work pretty well with WINE.

Linux seems to show promise, but in the end I just want to see what all the hype is about.

So this is the only Linux distro you have installed? Did you start with an older version say Cassandra and then upgrade? I've had problems with mint menu after an upgrade, and did the following. It may not fix your issue but it won't hurt to try:

It can also be (if you do not have mintMenu ver3.0 and higher) "pin Menu"
Right click the menu button and the gconf editor opens and on the page you get you find this option.
If it's ticked untick and it's solved

MagnusB wrote:What exactly did you add to the session? Sessions isn't a software that starts, it just loads applications and daemons at start...

Spype... That is, the shortcut to it, as far as I remember. Now I can't even start Sessions or for that matter shutdown the system by pressing the Shutdown button in the MintMenu. Not really sure if these are related though.

PS: I can however shut down (or logout for that matter) by hitting the power button.